The past is never dead. It's not even past. This infamous William Faulkner quote, borrowed for the title of Carlos Castro Arias' exhibition, reflects both the artist's and the writer's beliefs in the enduring significance of history and how it continues to exert its influence on the present. Faulkner's motto also perfectly resumes the research of the Bogota-born, San Diego-based artist.

Castro Arias often evokes traditional artistic genres connected to the Western art historical tradition, like tapestry, commemorative painting, and sculpture. He subverts the linguistic codes of his aristocratic historical references to narrate the contradictions and vulgarity of the present, underlining, with an attitude suspended between humor and cynicism, Colombian society's paradoxes, myths, and rites.

Another recurrent theme in Castro Arias’ work is his attention to historical figures and foundational events, hijacking their appearance in order to question their current meaning. Such is the case for his obsession with Cristopher Columbus, or more prominently, Simón Bolivar. Diverting away from the representational canon as a heroic effigy, Castro Arias revisits several times the figure of “El Libertador” [The Liberator] across his career, finding incisive ways to dispute its grandeur in each one. Is also the case for the Catholic Monarchs that open the exhibition, a 19th Century monument defaced in public space and recontextualized in the museum context.